


Scenes From A Heartbreak In Progress

by Not_Crazy_Just_a_Fangirl



Category: Smallville, Supergirl (TV 2015)
Genre: Clark Kent and Lex Luthor Reconciliation, Clark Kent's Double L Fetish, F/F, Gen, History Repeats, Kara Danvers Needs a Hug, Lena Luthor Knows Kara Danvers Is Supergirl, Lex Luthor Has A Point, Lex Luthor Knows, Lies, M/M
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2019-03-13
Updated: 2019-03-28
Packaged: 2019-10-12 18:28:35
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 10
Words: 13,200
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/17472716
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Not_Crazy_Just_a_Fangirl/pseuds/Not_Crazy_Just_a_Fangirl
Summary: A series of one-shots depicting the relationships between our favorite Kryptonians and Luthors, including but not limited to: Kara's arrival on Earth and her adjustment period, Lex Luthor's reaction to Kara befriending Lena, and Clark and Lex awkwardly trying to be friends again.





	1. Story List and Summaries

Final Chapter Order:

 

Not With A Bang (Checkmate)

Lex plays chess. Clark was always better at checkers. Or, things fall apart: slowly then all at once.

 

It's A Matter of Us or Them In This Fight

Lex’s descent into Madness. Or, Belle Reve.

 

Evil Genius of A King 

Lex and Clark's relationship, through the years. A friendship, before and after the fall.

 

Through The Leaves and Concrete You’re Gonna Grow

Clark Kent gets a job at the Daily Planet. Superman makes his debut.

 

You Wear Your Grief Like A Badge

Clark has made plenty of tough decisions. Some good, some bad. He’s the king of hard choices it seems like: To tell Lex the truth or keep him in the dark. To be a hero or keep being human. To live a double life. To move to Metropolis. So when the traumatized 13 year old lands in Smallville, well, there’s some more choices to be made.

 

I'll Write You A Tragedy 

The progression of Kara and Clark's relationship. From strained beginnings onwards. Or,  Kara arrives on Earth. And has a difficult time adjusting. 

 

You Must Remember This

Kara remembers Krypton. She is the only one.

 

I’m Half-Doomed And You’re Semi-Sweet

They don’t hate each other; that’s precisely the problem. Kara finds that it is impossible to hate the man Kal-el has become; this somehow makes her want to hate him more.

 

In Another Country (People Die)

Sometimes Lex has nightmares. Sometimes Kara wants to burn down the world.

 

The Great Metaphysical Interior 

Five times Kara meets Lex.

 

Repeat Your Favorite Mistakes (And Love Them All Again)

Lex is gonna train Kara to be better than Clark. Whether she knows it or not. Or, Lex is madder than Kara thinks.

 

Children Who Start Fires 

Lois Lane is raised by a general, and falls in love with an alien turned superhero. Or, Lois Lane appreciation, and her relationship with Kryptonians.

 

Protect Me From What I Want

Kara wants her family. Clark wants to be human. Superman arrests Lex Luthor. Kenny is dead. Kara and Alex learn to be sisters. Kara isn’t sure how any of this is meant to be normal.

 

Blasting Across The Alkali Flats

Lena is a Luthor, but she is not her brother. Or, Lena, after Lex is arrested.

 

Not In The Absence of Violence 

A look at Lex's thoughts, from Kara's arrival on Earth to her debut as Supergirl.

 

A Sequence You Never Learned

Sometimes, the weight of Kara’s expectations threatens to crush them both.

 

How Can You Be in Two Places at Once, When You're Not Anywhere at All

Piece by piece, Kara learns to love the Earth. It feels like losing part of herself. It feels like a betrayal.

 

If You Talk Enough Sense, Then You’ll Lose Your Mind

Kara starts to like earth. Eventually. Or, five conversations Kara Zor-el has with Martha Kent on her way to becoming Kara Danvers.

 

A Phoenix Must First Burn

Even when she adjusts, Midvale isn’t built for Kara.

 

Failure is an Orphan

Kara gets out of Midvale, eventually. It is not the victory she imagined.

 

Made A Scene By The Revolving Doors

Kara goes to college, and has a very human crisis when it comes to picking a major. 

Clark has Lois’s ring burning a hole in his pocket. Lex gives Kara a present.

 

When You’re Busy Making Other Plans 

Kara learns how others see Clark Kent. Or, five conversations she has about her cousin.

 

Everyone Needs A Place 

Jimmy Olsen is Clark Kent's best friend, post-Lex Luthor. He is tasked with keeping Kara safe, from herself.

 

And They Won’t Believe You When You Write Home About It

The Symbol on her chest makes them think they know her. She is not her cousin. Or, Kara adjusts to being Supergirl. 

 

Watch Me While I Miss The Sky

Lex knew Kara would one day follow Superman’s footsteps, that doesn’t mean he’s thrilled with it. Or, Lex gives Supergirl advice.

 

Where Everyone Knows Your Name

Clark could announce he’s Superman and people still wouldn’t put it together. Kara doesn’t have this luxury.

 

All Straight Lines Circle Back Sometimes

Alex does not remember that Kara is supergirl. Argo city has survived. Kara doesn’t know what to do anymore.

 

Hope Is Not The Goal

Winn leaves. Brainy stays. Nia has superpowers. James is dating Lena. Kara sometimes feels like she’s living someone else's life, a cheap knock off version of her cousin. 

 

Here Comes A Candle To Light You To Bed

Lex is not as evil as Superman thinks, and is less innocent than Supergirl believes. Or, Kara and the discovery of Red Daughter.

 

Watch Me Stumble Over And Over

Jimmy reminds her that Clark and Lex were once best friends. And how it poisoned them. She won’t repeat history. Or, five times Kara is warned about befriending Lena and one person (Lex) who thinks it might just be a good idea.

 

Playthings of a Prince(ss) 

Kara and Lena are friends. Lena and Supergirl are friends. History is a funny thing.  Kara Danvers is friends with Lena Luthor. It feels a bit like she's read this story before.

 

Doomed to Repeat it

Kara knows their history, she won’t let it become hers.

 

Later On, The Road Is Gonna Break Your World In Two

Lena is no idiot. Kara Danvers is supergirl. She just doesn’t know what to do with that information.

 

I Know The Way The Story Goes

Kara knows the story of Lex and Clark. Knows the secrets and distrust and the entire messy business of legacy and loss that broke their friendship - turned them into something between mortal enemies and star crossed lovers and she's never really sure which makes them more doomed to kill each other or die trying. Which is why she has to tell Lena the truth. And what makes it so hard.

 

It Should Mean Laughter, Not Poison 

Clark and Lex were friends once. Even if they forget it. Lex and Clark have a heart-to-heart about Lena and Kara's friendship.

 

What You Have Tamed 

A five-times fic on Kara's less human moments. Sometimes, it is painfully obvious Kara isn't human. 

 

The Woods Are Lovely, Dark, and Deep (But I Have Promises to Keep)

Or, 5 times Kara mother-hens Clark.

 

The Kids Stay In The Picture

Clark likes making enemies, Kara takes a different approach. Or, while Clark and Bruce play chicken, Kara befriends Dick Grayson. 

 

If You Lived Here, You’d Be Home By Now

Kara is afraid to ask about Krypton in Barry’s universe.

 

Its A One-Two Step, But Forward And Back Is Anyone’s Guess

The other earth is weird for Kara. No Superman or Supergirl, Oliver is nearly but not the same as the Green Arrow Kara is vaguely aware Chloe is married to. Batman has disappeared, and there are no robins in gotham. 

 

Precious Few Heroes

Clark comes home, dies, and comes back to life. Kara meets the justice league. In some cases, twice.

 

I’ll Tell Me When I’m Older

Lex wants to have a part of Clark in his life. Or, The Life of Connor Kent.

 

You Ruined Everything, In The Nicest Way

Clark is not the last son of Krypton, because he has two sons. Or, Kon feels abandoned when Jon comes along, and Kara talks him down from his ledge.

 

(No Saints Here) Martyrs Never Last This Long

Some days, Kara doesn’t know if she’s the most or least adjusted of them. The last children of Krypton. Or, each Kryptonian has a Bat to keep them feeling human.


	2. Evil Genius of a King

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> The progression of the relationship between Lex Luthor and Clark Kent.
> 
> Before Clark Kent ever even thought of being Superman, he saved Lex Luthor from certain death.
> 
> Had they been any other pair of people, it would have been the start of an epic love story. Instead, it was the start of an epic friendship. For a while, at least.
> 
> "Let's admit without apology, what we are to each other"

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Title comes from the title of a painting by Giorgio de Chirico, 1915 - I saw it in The Met and I liked the title, so I borrowed it.  
> Quote in the summary comes from a Richard Siken poem.

Before Clark Kent ever even thought of being Superman, he saved Lex Luthor from certain death. Had they been any other pair of people, it would have been the start of an epic love story. Instead, it was the start of an epic friendship. For a while, at least.   


Clark Kent was only just growing into his powers, at the time, he hadn't even known he was an alien. Lex Luthor was on his own for the first time, back in Smallville where everything started (where the meteorite that was Kal-El crashed - not that they knew it then). Theirs was a fast friendship - they took the weight of the world off the others shoulders. Lex proved himself - to his father, to the company, he could do thing better, do things honest. Clark told him he could be better, a better man than his father ever could be. Lex Luthor didn't have to be evil. And Lex took the pressure of Clark, he didn't have to be a hero, he just had to be a friend (and with Smallville going to hell, people mutating left and right, its no wonder they were scared. Clark feared failing at fixing what he had inadvertently caused, Lex feared that, if sweet, bumbling, Clark could accidentally cause so much destruction, what havoc would an alien with full intent cause? So it begins, the divide between them.)  
Here is the fundamental cause of their downfall. Clark Kent - for all his good intentions - lies, and is a terrible liar at that. He makes Lex feel like he's going insane. And Lex Luthor - for all his talk of being better - is a Luthor breed and born. He wants to protect the Earth, even if that means protecting it from Clark.  
Clark may be thinking himself a hero now, but Lex has seen the worst of humanity, far outside the shelter of Smallville, what happens when Clark wants to start saving humanity from itself? Lex thinks he's the only one that can stop him.  


Clark obviously knows it.   


The problem, with having been best friends before all this, Lex thinks, is that they know all of each other's sharpest edges and sorest spots. They know how to hit where it hurts.  
Lex says Clark will never be a hero. Clark says Lex is a worse man than his father ever was. Somehow, neither one is lying, even when they both are. It hurts, because they both know the other still cares. But that's not enough.  


They've both always been too stubborn for their own good.   


Later, with Smallville in their rearview, they meet, time and time again. Lex Luthor - head of company, father's son, Superman - Hero of Metropolis, Clark Kent - Reporter, nobody. Lex calls Clark-the-reporter Smallville at every interview, like he can't be bothered to remember his name. Lois Lane retells this with glee. Superman has no business bothering Luthor for a long while - he doesn't actually do anything for a few years, nothing Superman has any business in anyway.  
For years, it's a bit of a dance. A careful non-acknowledgment. Careful to hit where it hurts, but always not to really injure. Lex using Kryptonite, but never enough to keep him down, only just barely enough. Clark, really, Lex will never not think of him as Clark, who is he even fooling with those glasses, Clark hits, but never leaves more than a bruise that heals in a day or two.   


They don't know where to go from here, but they can't go on like this. Sooner or later, one of them will slip, and Metropolis will be caught in the crossfire, exactly what they don't want.   


In the end, the stalemate is broken like this.   


Lex Luthor uses too much Red K. Superman breaks his ribs. Later, when Clark Kent comes too, far far away from the scene of the fight, he pales in remembrance. The next time they fight, Lex Luthor is taken into custody. Clark couldn't live with himself if he ever really hurt Lex. Lex gets maximum security, but the highest possible amenities and comfort, he is a Luthor after all.   


He also gets visitation. Lena visits once or twice a month - she loves her brother after everything.   


A reporter also visits him, a year later. That reporter is Lois Lane.   


Officially, she is there to ask about his would-have-been plans. His rivalry with Superman.   


Lois Lane is a legend after all.   


She is also one of a handle who knows The Secret.   


For a long while, she doesn't say a word. Lex stares her down. Until, she says:  
"He still loves you you know"  


She says it nonchalantly. As if commenting on the weather, not speaking to her boyfriend's best-friend-turned-mortal-enemy. Of all the things Lex expected her to say, it wasn't that.   


Instead, he drawls, "why should Smallville's feelings concern me?'   


He tries to look utterly disinterested. He's not sure he succeeds. Clark Kent has always been his kryptonite.   


Lois gives him look. "Because you're still calling him Smallville after everything."   


Having said her piece, Lois leaves him to think.   


The next time a reporter comes calling on the famed Lex Luthor, it is Clark Kent himself.   


A twice yearly piece on Superman's rival is assigned to them, Superman's most supportive reporters, by the Daily Planet. And Lois cannot stand Lex Luthor, so the job falls to Clark.   


This is the official story.   


To Lex, it feels like a not-quite-second chance. After all, Clark was never the enemy Lex was fighting. And Lex has always been Clark's best friend.

  
  



	3. Not With A Bang (Checkmate)

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Lex plays chess. Clark was always better at checkers.   
> Or, things fall apart: slowly then all at once.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Title from the phase: "The world ends, not with a bang, but with a whimper."

Lex goes to Smallville because it's where everything began, before he even knew the telltale signs of the beginning of the end. A meteor crashes, green rocks litter the ground, he loses all his hair. The Kent’s can’t have a baby, but they find one in a field. In fourteen years before anyone connects any dots.

  
Its fourteen years since he’s last stood in Smallville and Lex is an adult but doesn’t feel like it. All he knows is he’s smarter than his father gives his credit for, and this is the farthest he’s even been all on his own. He feels a little like Icarus, getting the first taste of flight. Except, when the car goes crunch-crash over the side of the bridge, he’s on the side of the road, staring down a fourteen-year-old far too earnest to be doing anything but lying straight through his teeth. What teenager doesn’t want payment or glory for saving a life? Probably when that life is a Luthor. Lex comes to Smallville to be his own man, but his name is a brand he cannot escape. Even when his father is halfway across the country, he feels the noose tightening around his neck.

  
Lex has never had a friend, not really. Sons of his father’s business partner, acquaintances, kids his sister, Lena, introduced him to because she worries about him and his apparent abhorrence for most of humanity. He has somehow found a friend in Clark Kent, a boy several years younger and several degrees peppier and nerdier and yet, it seems, just as much weight in his shoulders. Lex looks at the handprints gouged into the car, but he won’t pry Clark’s secrets from him just yet. He’s a little bitter that Jonathan Kent won’t let Clark keep the truck. And a little jealous. Jonathan Kent may hate Lex for his name alone, but he is the antithesis to Lionel Luthor; every bit the sort of man Lex is trying and failing to be, though not for lack of trying so much of lack of a role model.

  
Clark is allergic to green rocks, it isn’t the strangest thing to ever happen in Smallville, but Lex is not from Smallville. He is, it seems, the only one to see through the Kent boy. The fact that he’s fourteen doesn’t escape Lex either. But Lex is not one to show his hand, when he can make the other player sweat.

  
Clark and Lex are best friends. But they’ve been playing chicken since they met. Lex sees the handprints in the car. Knows that Clark shouldn’t possibly get to school on time. Sees the atrocities Smallville breeds that others seem to selectively forgot. Lex is a Luthor; he is not an idiot. Lex also protect Clark from his own father, or perhaps both their fathers, some days it’s hard to tell who has the upper hand. Lex knows Clark’s secret, Clark knows he knows, but Clark LIESLIESLIES until Lex thinks his skull is going to crack apart.

  
Lex fears for humanity, if Clark isn’t the last alien to land. Clark fears his powers, fears failing to protect, fears the rise of a villain he can’t handle. They say the hero makes his own villain. The villain only as strong as the hero. Two sides of a coin.  Both of them are living up to their destinies. Playing the hands they are dealt. Lex is a master at chess. But he can only bluff his cards for so long.

  
Lex is a Luthor. Clark is Superman. Smallville has always been the beginning of the end; and in Metropolis, Lex is the one with the home field advantage.

  
  



	4. You Wear Your Grief Like A Badge

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Clark has made plenty of tough decisions. Some good, some bad. He’s the king of had choices it seems like.  
> To tell Lex the truth or keep him in the dark.  
> To be a hero or keep being human.  
> To live a double life.  
> To move to metropolis.  
> So when the traumatized 13 year old lands in Smallville well, there’s some more choices to be made.

Clark Kent grows up in Smallville, Kansas. He is the epitome of small town America, All-American farm boy. Strong, polite and blue-eyed. He is one of a handful of his graduating class, of Smallville history, to get out to make something bigger than himself. He goes to Metropolis University, and everyone says Ma and Pa Kent must of done something right to get a boy like him.

But before he was Clark Kent, he was Kal-El. He was a baby who landed in a field outside Smallville along with meteors. On one of the biggest tragedies in Smallville’s history, Martha and Jonathan Kent found a baby in a spaceship, and named him Clark.

They never tell him anything about it. Tell him he’s too strong and fast for sports. To keep quiet about the ways he is special. They don’t tell him why, until he’s fourteen. 

He is fourteen, and fighting the aliens he may well have created when he brought those meteors to earth, intentionally or not. He is an alien, and turns himself into a superhero.

He is a terrible liar, and even worse at keeping his secrets.

This is important. Because Lex Luthor is one of his best friends, and is the first to figure him out. He lies, and Lex knows he is lying. Lex wants to understand. And then Lex wants to help. And instead of distancing himself, Clark becomes one of Lex’s only friends, and lets him think he’s crazy. Gaslights him, lies about what he knows, what Clark knows Lex saw. Let’s Lex think he’s insane, and doomed to become just like his father. Leads Lex down the path he so desperately did not want to fall down. He knows this. Its every comic book origin ever. A villain makes a hero, but a hero makes a villain just the same.

Clark is not a good liar, except when it is too himself. He can convince himself he’s a better secret keeper than he is. Convince himself Lex was walking his path before he ever met him. Convince himself their fallout is not his fault; that if he had told Lex the truth, he would have hated him, dissected him, outed him.

Clark Kent is from Smallville, Kansas, where there are no aliens, no oddities, and boys don’t like boys unless they want to get strung up in a cornfield. Good thing none of those things affect Clark Kent.

So, he moves to Metropolis. Because he can do more good there, he convinces himself. Not because he’s running away from Smallville, from his father’s disappointment in Superman. Superman doesn’t belong in Smallville. Clark Kent wears glasses and hunches his shoulders to seem smaller than he really is. Clark Kent is a reporter for the Daily Planet and works with Lois Lane because he’s the only one who’ll let her bully him without crying or endangering their life by pissing her off. 

Superman’s named is coined by Lois herself. He wears an S on his chest for it too. The S is definitely not a product of what he discovers in his infant self’s spaceship. It is not the crest of a family he never and will never know. Superman barely knows anything of Krypton, so what would Clark Kent know of it.

Not surprisingly at all, it takes less than a year for Lois to figure it out, and its before Clark has figured out she was already attracted to him. He doesn’t try to refute it this time - he knows what madness that way lies.

Clark Kent is twenty-five when another spaceship crashes in Smallville. He’s home for the harvest fest, and he’s making friendly smalltalk with Lex. Because Clark Kent is still friends with Lex Luthor - who was his best friend throughout high school and practically paid his college tuition. Superman is Lex’s enemy. Lex, who thinks Superman might just pose a threat to Earth one day, who might get sick of saving it. Lex, whose been hurt once, and ways Kryptonite around his neck so Clark cannot stand to close. Neither of them acknowledge that Clark flinches and trips whenever Lex stands too near, or claps a hand on his shoulder. An impossibility when Clark is a head taller and a hundred pounds heavier.

They are the first ones to the spaceship, away from anyone else thank God (thank Rao some part of him thinks he should say).

Inside, there is a girl. She is blonde, blue-eyed, and wears Superman’s S on her chest. They discover she is thirteen, her name is Kara Zor-El, and she is looking for her infant cousin Kal-El. 

They take her to the Kent farm, for lack of other options. It is autumn, and she shivers in her dress. Ma Kent piles her with Clark’s old jackets and a mug of cocoa. Clark takes to her in stilted Kryptonian, which she makes at face at, confirming his suspicions that his accent is atrocious. She understands what has happens before Clark can figure out how to word it. She asks him his name, he tells her Clark. She meets his eyes, and tells him, does not ask, that he was born with the name Kal-El. He nods.

She breaks down in sobs in the kitchen. Falls right to the floor. Clark reaches for her, but she runs, faster than he’s ever tried to move before. She comes back an hour later, an eerie calm settled over her bones - a calm before the storm. She is drenched in water and mud. And her hands and palms all the way up her arms are covered in scratches and blood. Clark pales, because she shouldn’t be able to be hurt like that, not if they have the same blood, the same powers. He doesn’t know if its different for girls or if she just hasn’t been here long enough for the powers to take hold - his didn’t come until he was fourteen after all. 

She smiles, and it's terrible in its grief. She holds out green rocks to him, and says, to the best of his understanding, that she has found a piece of home. Ripped them from the earth. The pain is grounding, negating the effect of the yellow sun thrumming in her veins. 

He doesn’t know what to do with her. This girl holding Kryptonite like its precious, who speaks of their powers like a curse rather than a gift. This girl from another planet, half feral with grief and trauma. This girl who is all of thirteen and yet supposedly older than him. 

Clark is barely able to keep his own two lives in order. He doesn’t think he can take care of a whole nother person. An alien. 

She needs people. She needs humans. She needs to learn the lessons he learned and hopefully with a lot less grief and stress. And she doesn’t need false hope. Clark likes being human, he likes earth. He has a ring for Lois practically burning a hole in his pocket. He knows he cannot give her what she needs.

He knows he cannot be the strange girl’s family. 

But maybe he can find her one. It's the least he can do, for blood.

  
  



	5. I'll Write You A Tragedy

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Kara arrives on Earth. And has a difficult time adjusting.  
> Or,  
> The progression of Kara and Clarks relationship. How Kara becomes a Danvers.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Title comes from the phrase: "Show me a hero, and I'll write you a tragedy"

Clark leaves Kara with the Danvers. He doesn’t know what to do with her, a thirteen-year-old cousin who came twenty years too late, both of them out of their depth. She’s alone and scared and traumatized and Clark doesn’t know how to fix it without making her feel worse so he takes her to those he knows will do right by her.

Kara screams and shrieks as he tries to leave; mostly in Kryptonian. Clark my not speak the language but he does get the gist of it: how dare he betray her; how dare he leave her with strangers. They are the only kryptonians left. But Clark has never known Krypton, and cannot give her the solace she seeks. He leaves.

(She screams COWARD COWARD COWARD at his retreating figure in the sky until her voice runs hoarse. She does not speak to anyone for several days, when she decides to begin speaking, it is in stilted English, but only to Jeremiah).

Alex hates having a sister, especially an alien. Kara hates Earth, and hates that she cannot be a hero like Clark even more. She fluctuates between sheer idolization of him, and utter hatred. Kara saves a child from a car about to explode, bears Alex’s fury, and wears the lead lined glasses Jeremiah gives her. She has been living with the Danvers for a week. She has been on Earth for two (the first spent in Smallville when she crashed during the Harvest Festival).

Kara is thirteen, and has learned enough English, and adjusted to the translator she wears to fill the gaps well enough that they think starting her in school is a good idea. Arguably, because the Danvers need to work, and not give Kara time to practice her powers or aggravate Alex into possibly strangling her. They want her to have a chance at being normal they tell her. They enroll her into Alex’s freshman year class, so have a familiar face. Alex is seriously aggrieved. Kara stays silent, though inside she is screaming that this ISN’T normal, not the way she knows, lived it, craves it. Normal doesn’t have yellow suns, or a lack of space travel. Normal doesn’t have her living with a family that barely wants her, while her only family remaining has picked a girl (Lois Lane) and a city (Metropolis) and a job (reporting) over her (his last remaining blood in the Universe).

Kara knows more math and physics than the entire human race has even discovered. But she can barely pass history or write an essay. Morals, culture, numbers, alphabets. Everything is different. She has a learning curve greater than anything Clark ever had to face. They say to stop comparing herself to Clark; she thinks she’ll stop when everyone else does.

High school is daunting. Alex ignores her. She is taking Advanced Placement Physics and Advanced Placement Calculus and is nearly bored to tears and frustrated to tears in equal measure. Because she’s known more than half these concepts since before Krypton died, and she keeps forgetting that there are theorems and proofs and constants she cannot use, simply because humans have not discovered them. She has learned their existence and application, but never learned their proof, does not have anything but her memory to prove herself right. Like an earth child who understands gravity, but could not show it mathematically. Mentally converting Kryptonian numbers to Earth ones takes more effort than the actual math does, but she doesn’t set anything on fire with the glare of her eyes, so the Danvers consider this a success.

English is another story all together. She has only just begun to learn the language. Human sounds and linguistics in general. She has a translator and an eidetic memory, but even that is not enough to translate idioms and expressions and lifetimes and decades of pop culture and references and a hundred dozen little things she can understand literally and not understand at all. Writing is different, letters are different, beyond even just grammar and spelling. English, with a seemingly infinite list of rules and contradictions and expectations folding in on itself, is not something to master in the course of six months. They put her in remedial English for English as a second language students, and she still manages to be the worst in the class. History is no better, and in many ways worse. All the language barriers, topped with a simple fact that she does not have the fourteen years of earth and American culture experienced that her classmates do. Even the most basic of facts she fails, simply for never having encountered them.

Kara hateshateshates it here. She wants to go to Metropolis with Clark. Wants to be a hero. She doesn’t want to play-act at being human when she isn’t. She can fly, She can stop a bullet. She can do anything Clark can do; between the two of them, she has less experience but more knowledge. She knows more than he does of aliens and villains and mechanics od their powers. She knows how the yellow sun affects them down to their molecules. But he gets to save lives and she gets to stay in Midvale with a not-sister who hates her, a not-mother who doesn’t understand her, and a not-father who is gonegonegone. Sometimes Kara wants to leave. Sometimes, she wants to rip the world apart with her bare hands, because why should this primitive and impossibly cruel planet exist when Krypton cannot? There are days where she agrees with Lex Luthor more than Clark Kent. Lex, who was not so much on the precipice of becoming a villain, but already on his fall to being exactly the man he didn’t want to be. She thinks maybe its Clark that pushed too far. She thinks Lex’s fall wasn’t only one from grace, because she sees the way Lex and Clark look at each other. But Smallville, Kansas is a long way from the rest of the universe, she knows this better than anyone. She knows they are stubborn enough to still be friends. But not enough to ever push to be more, too scared of themselves and each other. She knows her arrival may be the last straw that breaks everything. Clark says he doesn’t know what to do, but Kara never asked for him to know, she just wants him here.

Kara leaves one day. She has been with the Danvers for a short while and long enough. The first time Clark tells her he’s leaving her, before she even gets to Midvale and screaming, she runs to Lex Luthor, the only man who knows what it feels like to be betrayed by Smallville’s golden boy. Clark is too human for his own good. And Kara cries and rages, and its Lex Luthor who comforts her about going to Midvale. Superman is the hero, and Luthor is the villain. Sometimes, that not a line easy to remember, when Lex has been nothing but kind, and Clark has abandoned her.

But now, a year into being human, or as human as she can manage, Kara has only just started being close to Alex. They’ve solved the murder of her only friend, Kenny. And Lex is in prison. She can’t run to him a gain. Can’t run to Clark, because he’s out being a hero or he’s out being with Lois and all it boils down to is he doesn’t want her, doesn’t want Krypton’s memory. Clark likes being human, feels more human than anything else. Kara cannot fathom it. But he was raised on Earth. They keep comparing her progress and powers to his, but they are fundamental differences that will never change. Clark may have powers, but Kara is the only Kryptonian left. Some days, she’s tempted to be the monster Lex expected Clark to become, if only to get them, either of them, ANYONE to notice her as more than Kal-El’s little (older) cousin. She hates calling him Clark, a reminder of everything that went wrong.

She’s a senior in high school, and four years into Earth bound living before the hate and hurt she feels to Clark fades back into Idolization. He’s her last remaining family, she’ll take what she can get. He visits, and he speaks to her, and its more and better than what she got at thirteen. She loves him, even if she still can’t really stand Lois all that much. When the counselor’s start asking about colleges, she picks Metropolis University and studies journalism. She wants to be a hero like her cousin, might as well be like him in this too. There are not many options where he gaps in knowledge or unique skill-set will go unnoticed or unchallenged. She gets a job working for Cat Grant, who used to work with Perry White, and who hates (and admires) Lois Lane. It feels like the right choice. It feels like being human.

  
  



	6. You Must Remember This

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Kara remembers Krypton. She is the only one.

Kara’s greatest fear is forgetting. Forgetting her mother’s voice, the faces of her aunts and uncles, the names of the people dear to her. She dreads the day she cannot remember the Kryptonian word for something, forgets a prayer to Rao, forgets any part of the culture or history, the science or math, of her people. 

Kara dreams of the red sun, the way it gleams and glints off the unique architecture of Argo City. The way the ground looked, the plants that grew, the animals that lived, the food they ate. The Kryptonians were not the only ones which went extinct that day. 

Kara remembers their language, their school, her friends. Their numbers, their alphabets. She remembers Rao’s promises to her people, and in turn, her promise to them as well. To keep the memory and blood of Krypton alive. To find and raise Kal-El in their home’s memory.

She remembers fires and screams. She remembers her entire world disappearing, going up in smoke. She remembers endless time in the capsule, in the phantom zone.

She is the only one who remembers Krypton.

She tries to bring some of that memory to others. Tells the Danvers about Argo city, about the maths and sciences there. She tries to teach Alex their language. But no matter how hard she tries, there are some sounds a human tongue cannot make, and cannot distinguish by sound alone. 

She tries to teach Clark. But he does not believe in Rao, he does not follow even earthly religion. He will not learn the prayers she believes down to her soul. He is stilted and awkward in their native tongue. He does not care to learn much at all about their history, their science, their politics, because it is no point he says. Krypton is gone, and they will be the last Kryptonians anyway. Even if they have kids he says, they will be more human than anything. Their home will be their place of birth, the place there are raised. So what then does it say of Kara, who was not born here, was not raised here, and still clings to the memories of her home. She understands what he implies - she is the last daughter of Krypton, because she is the only one who still cares enough to identify it as home.

But she simply cannot get used to the yellow sun she sees when she wakes up in the morning. Still dreams of a red sun consuming her planet whole. Wakes up with the feeling of smoke in her lungs, dying screams in her ears.

Kara remembers Krypton, and Krypton will die with her.

  
  



	7. I'm Half-Doomed and You're Semi-Sweet

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> They don’t hate each other. That’s precisely the problem.  
> Kara finds that it is impossible to hate the man Kal-el has become; this somehow makes her want to hate him more.

The thing about Clark Kent is this: it is impossible to hate him. 

Lex Luthor knew this well. Because Clark is a terrible liar, and keeps secrets at the worst possible times, and doesn’t always understand how his actions affect the world around him. Doesn’t understand how his lies make Lex angry and half-insane. Doesn’t understand why Metropolis now seems to fall to pieces when he’s gone for more than a night. 

But Clark has the best intentions. Always. He was built without an ounce of malice or guile in his too strong frame. He is ernest, and kind to a fault. He will shoulder any weight or guilt you can hand over to him without a second thought. 

He is everything Lex fears. Proof that life beyond the earth exists - and could terrifyingly over take humanity with ease. And Lex could never be scared of Clark - Clark is too scared of himself to ever even come close to physically hurting a human being, but he is scared of the implications. The next alien to crash land might to stronger than Clark. Might be angrier or more dangerous than Clark. Might be more willing to end humanity than Clark. This is what Lex fears.

But he could never hate Clark himself.

* * *

There is a reason Kara befriends Lex Luthor - her cousin’s sometimes mortal enemy. Even before she begins to even tolerate the Danvers. The reason is this: he is perhaps the only person on Earth that knows what it's like to hate Kal-El with every fiber of their being, and yet, not hate him at all. Love him in fact. The fact that Lex calls him by a different name is not as significant as when anyone else uses his earth-given name.

Because Kal-El - or Clark, whatever you call him - is many things. He is a terrible but persistent liar. He is too convinced of his own convictions, of his own morals, of his own opinions. He is stubborn, and the more he should convince he is wrong, the more he digs his heels in. He is oblivious when he is hurting people, or when people are able to see right through him. He cannot admit when he needs help, too determined to shoulder the weight of a planet not his own all alone. He will not admit his heritage, of the pang of hollowness it gives him no matter how desperately his last remaining blood in the universe needs him to.

These are all reasons to hate him. Lex says his faults comes from the fact that Clark is too convinced that he is only human: and all human have faults. And most, if not all, are convinced they are the exception.

And she can tell Kal-El resents her. Resents that she came late. Resents that she showed up at all. She offers a connection to the home he never knew he wanted to know about, opened a wound he never knew had scarred over, and he hates her for it. Even if he does not recognize it as hate. The same way he claims he’s worried for Lex, or afraid for his rising insanity, the same way he resents him for figuring out his secret. He gets the two feeling confused. 

She wants him to admit it - admit he resents her, hates her, doesn’t want her around him, or taking his spotlight or heroism from him. It would be easier to hate him if he admitted he hated her back.

Because it's impossible to hate him as he is. 

Because Kal-El cares. About everyone, and everything. Takes everything as a personal hit, straight through the heart. He worries about her - how she’ll adjust to earth, how she’ll feel and fit in amidst humans, how she’ll deal with her trauma, how she’ll remember their people, how she’ll use her powers, how she’ll become her own person.

He sends her away because he cannot be the best for her, all of twenty-five and too human for her comfort. She will try to make him more, search for her connection to her people that he does not have - not in the way she wants him to. He cannot heal her - and he knows this. Is so gentle and kind when he tells her he’s taking her to Midvale, that she wants to scream. He treats her like every victim he has ever saved. Sincere, heartfelt concern, efforts to mitigate the trauma, to find the best way for them to recover. As if she is nothing special. As if they aren’t the last of their people, in the entire universe. She doesn’t want to be treated like every other victim, like a human child. She wants her cousin - but he doesn’t want her. And he covers up the truth with justice and the american way. What do humans say? Two out of three ain’t bad.

But she cannot hate him. Because he has grown into exactly the kind of man their family would have wanted him to grow into. And she cannot hate him, because he is her last connection to Krypton left alive. 

  
  



	8. Protect Me From What I Want

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Kara wants her family.   
> Clark wants to be human.

Normal means something different to Kara. 

Normal is a red sun. Feud with Daxamites. 

Normal is interplanetary politics and travel. 

Normal is millions of miles away from Midvale.

But there is a new normal for Kara. Kara Zor-El, who is 13 and left in Midvale, because Kal-El is all grown up, and rather than needing her, didn’t know what to do except to leave her with a family who knew his secrets and could care for her better than he could, he claims. Kara hates it, but she understands. She knows when she is unwanted.

She is less understanding when they make her hide everything about herself when Clark gets to flaunt it. She understands the secrecy - but she isn’t allowed even that. Clark gets to be Superman. Kara gets to be the weird new girl, at a new school, where everything is weird and awful and decidedly not normal. The yellow sun is odd on her skin, prickling uncomfortably, too heavy, too hot. The lead glasses discomforting to adjust to. Her pseudo-sister hates her existence. The very air of the planet feels dense and heavy in her lungs, settling poorly. She feels as if she’s drowning; it's only partially a metaphorical feeling.

Normal would mean normal strength, not feeling lost in her own skin. Her stength is off, gravity is different. She feels too light and too heavy all at once. Her eyes see through things, burn things when she’s angry. She cannot kick and scream and cry the way she wants to, because on this planet, she may just tear the house down, cause an earthquake. She doesn’t want to be careful, to be human-normal. She wants to go home, but her home doesn’t exist anymore.

But Kara trudges through, until Kenny is killed.

Then...well. If Clark could fight the meteor mutants of Smallville in his pre-Superman days back in high school, then she can solve her only friend’s murder. They call Chloe, who wisely doesn’t ask many questions. She was too used to Clark’s weirdness, and she grew up with the Smallville mutants after all. A normal human murder isn’t anything wild anymore.

The catch Kenny’s killer, and it isn’t an alien, it isn’t a meteor mutant. There isn’t any kryptonite, no mysticism, nothing to do with Kara at all really. Just small town America’s humanity at its worst. Kal-el grew up in Smallville, all-American farm boy they call him. The peak of human-normalcy. He has rose-colored glasses when he looks at the humans. All Kara can see is the ways they fail at measuring up. He feels human playing alien, Kara feels Krypton playing human. Clark calls himself an alien, Kara still sees the humans as the aliens. Therein lies the difference. 

Kara and Alex start getting along better. They become friends, rather than antagonists forced to share the same room, the same air, the same planet. Alex still gets jealous and angry, and Kara still doesn’t think of herself as a Danvers, but it's a start.

Then Superman arrests Lex Luthor, and Kara doesn’t understand. Because she alternates between idolizing the hero Kal-El has become, and hating him for choosing heroics over her. Because she has met Lex Luthor - once Kal-El’s best friend - and agrees with everything he has said about the next alien not being as friendly as Superman is. She worries some nights it might be her, if she cannot learn to love the humans and the Earth the way her cousin has. She has seen what's out there, knows better than Lex or Kal-El can imagine what destruction can be wrought upon Earth. Some nights, she thinks it might just be her that does so. Kal-El it seems, has a habit of betrayal - but no one could be as golden as they seemed. Everyone has a darkness - he just hasn’t admitted his. That just might make him all the more dangerous - he doesn’t realize just how much damage he can do.

Kara mets Lex because Clark is friends, of sorts, with him. Because they are friends and enemies; something more and less than either of those things. She meets him when she crashes into Earth, and they are both pretending they don’t know the other knows that Lex knows Clark is really Superman. 

They both want to protect humanity from threats - Lex wants to protect humanity from itself and from alien threats those not as kind as Superman. Clark just wants to do good and be allowed to do good, and wants people to not interfere. He thinks he can shoulder the weight of humanity's faults, they both do.

Kara thinks Lex makes some good points. And she thinks they both tread a too narrow line - one or the other was bound to fall, especially given their entire sordid history.

Kara visits Lex - she hasn’t seen him since back when she landed on earth. Back when Clark and Lex we’re still friends, while Superman and Luther were enemies. Kara thinks the DoubleThink broke their brains after a while. Playing a game of I know-you know-that I know-but we’re both pretending you don't know-I know what I know.

She visits Lex, because Clark is Earth’s resident heroic alien but he doesn’t quite know what’s out there the way Kara does and Lex suspects. He’s an optimist, and Kara has watched her planet burn and cannot help but think differently. Clark loves Smallville. But Kara finds Midvale suffocatingly small. They are not all that similar when it comes down to it, Kara and Clark. Because Clark has lived life believing he was human, goes through life as a human coming into a alien powers. It is the Kryptonian parts which comes hesitantly to him. Kara is still learning how to fake humanity. To keep her feet on the ground, while her thoughts still run in her native tongue. Kal-El does not remember living under a red sun, but Kara bears the weight of the yellow sun of Earth with difficulty. Like the weight of her entire world, the last true child of Krypton.

So Kara visits Lex, because Clark isn’t going to unless he’s dragged there. Lois may actually do that - Kara thinks Lois has more awareness of Lex and Clark’s feelings than either of them do. But Smallville, Kansas is a whole universe away from what Kara well and truly understands. She barely understands human courtships, but she knows enough to know fighting nearly to death is not romantic on this planet, not for humans at least.

Lex has his cell. Isolated from other prisoners, though lush, because the Luthor fortune cannot buy freedom but it can buy luxury.

“Smallville junior” he greets when he sees her.

“He sent me to Midvale actually” she replies .

She wonders if he can see the rage coiled in her frame, small and skinny as she is, looking younger than her age, even if you aren’t counting the years in the Phantom Zone. Her heels don’t lay flat to the floor, and she is wearing lead-lined glasses for a reason. She doesn’t touch walls, or anything really, if she can help it. 

She doesn’t know what to say after. There really isn’t anything to say. Because Clark put Lex here. Because Kara might just of have the straw that broke the camel’s back of Lex’s sanity. Because the last time they say each other Kara raged and cried that Clark was sending her away, and this supposed villain was the one that held her and got her to her new home safely.

He wears a pendant of kryptonite around his neck - one Kara knows came from a girl named Lana Lang, what might as well have been a million years ago for how far past it all seems. There is history there she knows, that it comes from a girl Clark once loved, that Lex protected him from. That there is precisely one thing Lana Lang, Lois Lane and Lex Luthor have in common that Kara knows of, without ever having met the first two. One day, Cat Grant will tell her about how she used to work for the Daily Planet, and how she and Lois Lane are something like frenemies, and how Clark Kent as a “goddamn double L alliteration fetish”. But here and now, Kara hasn’t met Cat Grant, so that thought doesn’t occur to her. Here and now, she only knows the barest bones of the story, and that Lana Lang was the beginning of the end for Clark and Lex, and the lies that tore them apart.

She doesn’t know why she came here. Only that it’s finally cemented how much no one wants her to be like Clark. She can’t be a hero like him. She can’t even do the things he did in high school to help people. She’s so frustrated she wants to scream or destroy something just to show them she isn’t as helpless as they seem to think. She’s homesick more than anything, and frustrated that they treat her so young and ignorant. Kara thinks this is probably how Lex felt every time Clark lied. She doesn’t know what to say though. So she just sits. 

Until Lex asks “Why are you even here?”

He seems tired. Bravado bleeding out of him until he is just Lex - a human. Kara doesn’t really know why. 

“Why” was a combination of factors that she couldn’t succinctly place into english words. 

“Why” was that he was Clark’s friend once upon a Time, a close friend. 

“Why” was Midvale was suffocating even now that she and Alex where getting along.

“Why” was that she hadn’t seen Clark since he left her there. 

“Why” boiled down to the fact that normal felt like prison. And she didn’t quite think he was evil - at least his intentions weren’t, though his methods left much to be desired. 

Finally she said “You helped me when he sent me away.” She figured it was fair to talk to him, one of four humans who knew who she was.

Lex snorts a laugh, “Fair enough.”

There is more silence before she asks “Do you ever just hate humans?”

And Lex shakes his head and goes “all the time.”

And after a pause “You really aren’t any thing like Clark. You’ve both got the whole sunny positivity thing but…” He trails off.

“Clark” Kara says “Is painfully human”.

She says his name like its sour and heavy in her mouth, foreign and wrong on her tongue.

“Clark” is all the best parts of humanity the Martha and Jonathan Kent could install. They both know this, and Kara hates him for it.

And Lex voices the unspoken second half of her thought, “but he’s a terrible Kryptonian.”

And Kara nods. It isn’t that she isn’t proud of her cousin, its that she feels lost. It was her job to raise him, to show in the Kryptonian way, train him, teach him their language, their culture. Ensure that Krypton had a last son as well as a last daughter. And she feels she has failed. He has embraced humanity too much to ever see himself as Kryptonian first, to listen to her truly, rather than simply humoring her. She is the last one who will worship Rao, the last native speaker of her tongue, the last to remember the splendor of Krypton in its prime. 

She feels betrayed by the humans who took him from her, that changed his name, took his loyalty from her and their people. Betrayed that he would choose his accidental life over his last remaining blood in the universe. That he cannot understand why she simply cannot embrace Earth as home as readily as he did. That he cannot understand why she does not wish to be coddled and treated like a child, because that was never the plan. No one asks what she wants or needs, they just tell her where she will go, live, how she will act and exist. Human social structures are very different from Kryptonian ones, and it is nearly as stifling as the foreign air in his lungs. He did not trust her enough to keep her with him, or even to send her to his own childhood home. He sent her off with what were little more than strangers, even to him, because she would be too much trouble for his found family. It speaks volumes to how much he embraces her, accepts her.

She feels that if he will not love her as blood, she has no reason to search for it in his beloved humans. 

He wants to push her off, forget about her and Krypton. Enjoy the ability the yellow sun gives him, and see himself as a hero of humanity, seperate from his lost culture, lost people. Wants to forget he is not human, wants to cling to his identity. Which supposes she can sympathize, because that's all she wants to.

  
  
  


  
  
  
  
  



	9. The Great Metaphysical Interior

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Five times Kara meets Lex.

1 - “I dodge the blast, and apologize for collateral damage”

Lex is the first human Kara meets. Before Martha Kent, and even before the Danvers, she meets Lex Luthor. 

Kara Zor-El lands in the middle of the Smallville Harvest Festival. Superman hasn’t shown up in Metropolis yet, not as they know him now, but Clark has one foot out the door of Smallville, and a heart set on Lois Lane. It is only a matter of time.

Kara is thirteen when she lands and is looking for an infant, when she finds a grown man who doesn’t need her, and worse, doesn’t want her. Well, it’s no wonder she imprints on Lex Luthor. Lex, who is human and unapologetic about it. Who wants to protect humanity from the threats aliens can pose. Who knows her cousin’s secret, and cares more about Krypton’s history and language than her cousin ever could, it seems. Lex, who is frightened of her, a girl from a strange world, who is lost, confused, scared, and cannot control her own strength, who’s tantrums could cause earthquakes if she didn’t hold every shaking cell of her body tightly coiled to prevent it with all her might. Lex, who she could snap in half before either realized she had done it, it the one who speaks to her, when all Kal-El can do is stutter and stress in confusion and surprise when she shows up in a cornfield.

Kara is all alone in the universe, her last family member distant and confused, trying to keep her quiet, out of the way, picking these humans over her and their legacy.   
The Harvest Festival is the oddest thing she’s ever witnessed. She is on a new planet. Everything from the composition of the air, the weight of the gravity, the color of the sun is new and odd and overwhelming. She has trouble with the language. Clark doesn’t speak a word of Kryptonian and Lex tried stiltedly to communicate with her. He tries more than her own blood. She’ll learn later it is in large part do to his cowardice in facing his problems with Clark. That at this point they were treading an ever thinning line. Lex knew, Clark knew he knew. They were avoiding the alien elephant-shaped hole in their friendship. Superman and Clark as separate identities to their friendship.   
Lex has to leave Smallville for a while - Kara doesn’t want him to. Doesn’t want to be left alone with the cousin who is a grown-up stranger to her. Nothing what she expected, who doesn’t want to acknowledge Krypton at all. Lex leaves her his copy of 1984, but it’s months before she can even begin to read it and understand at all. She thinks Lex was putting too much faith in Doublethink to keep him sane. She is baffled by humans. More so by Kal-El who insists on being called Clark, insists on pretending to be human even when alone, on the humanity he shouldn’t possess in the first place.

 

2 - “I don't think I can take the way you make me out to be”

The second time Kara meets Lex, it isn’t an accident like the first. It’s because she has nowhere else to go.

She is in Smallville, until Clark returns to Metropolis and Lois. 

He says she can’t go with him, and can’t stay with Martha. Kara likes Martha, who raised Kal-El when Kara couldn’t, who is allowed to know about her powers and her struggles with english and earth in general. She is nice, but she is not Kara’s family and she hates how Clark looks at her like she’s meant to be. Martha does not presume what Kara will consider her, does not demand Kara see her as a mother, despite what Kal-El expects.

But she hates how they call him Clark here, because it isn’t his name. 

He takes her to friends of his he calls the Danvers. A family whose father he works with, and who know about aliens. 

He’s told them about Krypton. Like it's his story to tell, as if her experience can be reduced down the the simple term of “trauma”. She has watched her family die, her planet explode, and Clark has the gall to call them her new family, a chance at being human. 

As if that is her great concern. As if she hasn’t failed the last wishes of her family by letting him grow up without her.

Clark never knew Krypton, and Krypton has been gone for 2 decades. But to Kara, her entire family and planet and life has died less than a month ago. And the last of her blood is abandoning her. Reducing their blood to a far-flung distant tragedy. 

She screams and curses and forgets the small bits of human language she’s gathered. Kal-El doesn’t understand her words but understands her meaning. Sort of. She is livid, but she is also hurt. Cut to the marrow when she is meant to be bulletproof here. She rages herself right off the ground and Clark glares at her like she’s the one who's wrong here. He’s the one leaving her. Kara hates him and hates this planet. If she actually knew how to control her powers, she might just burn it all to spite him. 

She flies away, because she is going to burn something or just tear it apart with her hands without even thinking about it. She can’t control her powers and can’t control her anger or her tears. She can’t face Clark and she can’t face the so called Danvers and before she knows it she’s flying over Metropolis. She doesn’t know where Lex lives, but she figures the huge tower marked with Luthor is a good place to start. She lands on the roof and stays there until her eyes stop glowing and hands stop shaking and the foreign air settles in her lungs. There are dents in the roof where her feet landed, but she cannot bring herself to care.

Lex shows up. He shows up, when he doesn’t have to and shouldn’t even know she’s here and Clark wanted to leave her to strangers. Never mind she’s barely met Lex, but he’s the only other person on this entire strange planet she even vaguely knows. He comes towards her slowly, like she’ll startle right off the building. He doesn’t say a word but he hugs her and she sobs for the first time since landing here in earth. Sobs and sobs and sobs. When she gets a hold of herself, he pulls her down into an office in the building. Gives her water. Asks if she’s okay. She tells him. The whole horrid story; Krypton burning, Kal-El not wanting anything to do with his heritage or her, and about the place called Midvale he wanted to leave her in. 

He all but carries her into his car, she’s too exhausted to keep her head up let alone fly halfway across the country. He tells her about Clark, the boy whose more human than most humans, rather than Superman. He tells her about Clark who saved his life, grew into his powers, has only just come term with his alien status and his father’s death. How Clark usually has the best intentions and the worst possible plans, how he can’t lie, and persists in doing so when he thinks it will protect someone’s feelings, and is absolutely terrible at explaining himself. He tells her to give him a chance. It isn’t until he’s dropped her off in Midvale, driving off before anyone or the Danvers can see he’s been there, that she remembers they aren’t best friends anymore; that Lex is supposed to be the so-called supervillain. She can’t bring herself to knock on the door, but it doesn’t look like Clark is waiting for her. She doesn’t dare hope he’s looking for her. She doesn’t think he’d notice, even if she disappeared forever. She wonders if she’d hear the Danvers’ sigh of relief from wherever she ends up, if she had the courage to go.

She waits until Superman comes by with the rising sun, and he doesn’t say a word, ask her what happened at all, just takes her to meet the Danvers. And he is Superman like this, the closest he can come to really being her cousin, family crest, and powers from the yellow sun’s radiation. And the farthest he could be from being familial, from being anything like the boy Lex talked about, the boy Lex probably doesn’t even realize he’s in love with. 

Lex Luthor is in love with Clark Kent, mortal enemies with Superman, and Kal-El it seems doesn’t exist on Earth. 

 

3 - “And maybe if I continue watching I'll lose the traits that worry me”

She spends the first week with the Danvers hating and missing Clark in equal measure. Thinking him a hypocrite for denying her the use of her powers, the chance to be herself just as he has wrought. Resenting how everyone wants her to be human, when it’s the last thing she wants to be. She doesn’t leave her room, except to climb on the roof. She ignores Alex as much as she can. The other girl hates her for her existence, and Kara really can’t fault her, because it’s not like she wants to be here either. They talk about enrolling her in school, that she can’t sit alone and sad forever. And she wants to remind them that she has just watched her planet burn, her family die. This is all old news for them, but fresh to her mind.

She sends Lex an email once she reads the 1984 he gave her. Nothing much to do but read and absorb an alien language when she’s shut herself in the house and refused to communicate with anyone in it. It’s denial and anger and a hundred other things she can’t put a name to. It is the third time she reaches out to Lex Luthor. Lex never responds, but sends along a couple other books, Kara takes them to her room before anyone else sees them. Catch-22, Stranger in a Strange Land, Snow Drift, Hitchhiker's Guide to The Galaxy, The Princess Bride, histories of Greece and Rome, pictures of places, Aesop’s fables, fairytales, and human bedtime stories. Copies of all Clark’s superhero, supervillain, and alien files, because it’s her right to know what he does. She reads them all, reads all of Alex’s books too, everything from old children’s picture books to teen romance novels to old science textbooks. She has always liked reading, and it is a good distraction from the fact that something has to give, at some point. 

They talk about enrolling her in school, but she pretends to not understand enough to even eavesdrop. They can’t make her go if she still hasn’t grasped the language. As far as the Danvers are concerned, she’s still struggling her way through “Little Red Riding Hood”. It is not quite a lie. The language may be getting easier, but earth itself has not.  
She talks to Jeremiah first. Then Eliza. Her and Alex reach a tentative, antagonist peace that functions best when they limit exposure to each other in their waking hours. Kara wakes up in cold sweat and a scream trapped in her ribs every night without fail. She tries to learn the constellations of earth, see which, of any, share a star with krypton. She sits on the roof. Gazing at the stars, and holding her breath until she’s certain neither sob nor scream with escape, only a shaky breath of foreign air that settles heavy and gritty in her lungs.

It’s fine until they make Alex take her to a party on the beach. She saved a mother and child from a burning car. Somehow, this is a bad thing. Alex yells, people stare, Jeremiah gives her lead-lined glasses and she is grateful, but for someone constantly pushing her to be her own person, he sure is adamant about making her almost exactly like her cousin. She isn’t sure which is worse.

The news shows Lex Luthor being beat by Superman periodically. Kara wants to tell Clark something, wants to make Lex talk to him instead of whatever they’ve been doing that let best friendship turn into this mess. Lex makes Clark a hero, but Clark pushes Lex too far into being what he doesn’t want to be. She wants to blame Clark, she wants to reach out to Lex, she wants to lock them in a room until they figure it out. Kara wants a lot of things. But most of them are dead, impossible and a thousand miles and too many years away from Midvale.

She writes Lex letters, because it’s easier than writing to Clark. She writes about how earth sucks, how she misses home, the details she doesn’t want to lose forever, things she’d tell Clark if he ever stuck around long enough to hear them. Thoughts on the books he’s sent her. Sometimes, she writes in Kryptonian, because english letters are still hard to come by sometimes, and she worries about forgetting any detail of her own language. 

She never sends them.

 

4 - “I've got my heavy heart to hold me down. Once it falls apart my head's in the clouds.”

The fourth time she reaches out to Lex Luthor, it is the third time she sees him in person, and the first time it is for his benefit rather than hers. 

She follows all news related to Superman and Lex Luthor, finds it fascinating, and knows neither of them would call to tell her if anything important happens anyway. Lex wouldn’t see it as his place, to reach out to her, his ex-best-friend’s younger (older) traumatized cousin. Clark treats her like a human 13-year-old, one who isn’t matured by trauma and necessity. As if she wasn’t meant to land and raise an infant all on her own. Clark is awkward around her, too distant and too scared all at once, like he will break her. 

And then The Fight happens. 

Superman and Lex take it too far. Lex antagonizes, like he’s pulling Clark’s metaphorical pigtails. He’s made red kryptonite - he will, one day later, confess to trying to control Clark’s powers, neutralize without hurting him the way the green kryptonite does. But it doesn’t work out that way.

Superman breaks Lex Luthor’s ribs, throws him from a building - with his eyes glowing red, he is everything Lex was trying to prevent. Lex is concussed but alive in the end. Clark is horrified by his own hands, his own strength for the first time. 

Lex Luthor goes to prison, because Superman does not want to risk accidently killing him. And the people of Metropolis are afraid now, but the are afraid of the human who can take Superman’s control, not the man whose power could level the city.

So, Kara visits. Because she watches the news, and Clark doesn’t call. They exchange messages about once a month, perfunctory, and near meaningless. She is alive, she is angry, and he cannot do a thing about either of those. 

So, she visits Lex, who is alone in a cell, even if it is the nicest money can buy. Clark can seek solace with Lois, since that's what he always do0es anyway.

Kara shows up, but doesn’t think flying up to the window will work like it did with his penthouse. So, she walks in the front door. The guards ask what she’s doing. She is fourteen. She speaks english. She turns wide, watery eyes to them and beg to make sure Lex Luthor is alive with her own eyes: she doesn’t want to believe a hero could kill someone, even a villain. It cuts her inside, but it gets the job done. They let her visit him.

The guards stay lingering in the doorway, hesitant to leave an unsupervised girl in the same room as an infamously unhinged supervillain. So, she cannot say everything she would like to, but she thinks it's enough.

They don’t say much for fear of what can be overheard or misconstrued, but she sits in front of the glass, puts her hand to Lex’s: I’m here, I’m here, I’m here.

 

5 - “I wanna be more than you're thinking of everything seems to be estranged when you're alone”

It becomes a tradition of sorts. Kara sneaks out and visit Lex once a year. Mail is monitored, so are calls, they cannot risk what someone might think: exposing her secret, rumors that Lex is luring an underage girl to break him out of prison or something otherwise as wildly wrong and scandalous.   
So, she visits once a year. An anniversary of sorts. She knows Lena visits him, his sister Kara has never met. She knows Lois forces Clark to visit once a year. She does not ask how those conversations go. This is them - the two people on earth who know that Clark Kent is not the perfect golden boy he wants so desperately to be; and who love him despite how much they want to hate him.

They do not talk about Clark. Or Superman. Or Krypton at all even.

They talk about books, books Kara reads for school, that Lex recommends. They work their way through literature canon: Dickens and Tolstoy and Shakespeare and everything else they can think of. They pour over science texts, because learning earth’s physics and science makes Kara feel closer to her father. They pour over international law and politics and strategies of war, which makes Kara feel closer to her mother. 

Lex reads her college admissions essay over for her, her scholarship applications and proposals. She brings him pictures of places she visits on his suggestion - sneaking out at night to visit other countries, other places. There is more to earth than Midvale and Smallville and Metropolis. She goes to National City university. 

The guards stop questioning Kara - she is an allowed, established visitor, even if she only visits once a year, growing from gangly awkward thirteen year old to a clumsy but grown woman. She offers to break Lex out anytime he wants - the walls may be Superman proof, but she is stronger than he is. Lex refuses to but it in that position. He says she doesn’t have to keep visiting. She ignores him and pulls out the next book.


	10. In Another Country (People Die)

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Sometimes Lex has nightmares.   
> Sometimes Kara wants to burn down the world.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Title and epitaphs from: The Truth the Dead Know by Anne Sexton

1 - “It is June. I am tired of being brave.”

The crash landing of a second Kryptonian in Smallville is perhaps not the beginning of the end for Clark and Lex, but it is perhaps the the push, shove and tumble past the point of no return; the shattering of illusions that let them ignore the alien-shaped-elephant in the room of their fraying relationship.

They were good at pretending. Pretending Clark wasn’t a terrible liar, that he hadn’t driven Lex insane, and that Lex didn’t know the truth about Clark, and probably better than Clark did himself. But even they couldn’t pretend not to see the girl who climbed out of a spaceship from another planet wearing Superman’s crest.

A shivering, crying, screaming blonde thirteen year old is a hell of a lot harder to ignore than a metaphorical elephant.

This is the day that Lex wakes up in the middle of the night thinking of. Not the day Clark saved him, as he did for years, which is now more of a found memory, not days with Mercy, not his father, not the day Clark left for college or the day Lois Lane coined the name Superman. The day Clark and Lex had to give up their pretenses and pretending - the day Kara Zor-El crashed into earth and their lives is the day that makes him walk up in cold sweat and screams in his throat, wondering if Clark can hear them, and if he cares. He wonders how long they could have pretended and how far it could have taken them, and how long Clark can live with his own guilt and denial. He wonders how many of Clark’s messes he’s going to have to clean up just because Clark doesn’t notice that in his quest to fix humanity, he might also break it a little.

 

2 - “In another country people die.”

Krypton hangs like a ghost over Kara’s head, breathing down her neck. She hears the dying screams of her people in her sleep - some real, some imagined, all horrifying. She awakes to the all too current screams of humans. Far off and far flung, some being helped, some who she hears take their last breaths. Some as close as Midvale, nightmares and disputes in other homes. Some in far off countries Kara cannot yet name, speaking tongues Kara cannot translate, though grief and fear are universal enough to understand.

This is a truth Kara knows too well - people die. And there is no one to notice, not always anyway.

It is these times she envies her cousin. He has spent long enough on Earth to have suppressed the worst of their hearing. He has to strain to hear as far as she can. He has honed his hearing, developed the ability not to be cut to the marrow for every helpless scream he cannot help - by helping those who he can. Kara has no such outlet for the pain of what she hears. And her ears are far more sensitive - a problem Kal-El has not dealt with since infancy. 

He grew up with this yellow sun and odd gravity. His powers will be more muted, but more malleable. He will learn easier, quicker than she will - but she will forever be stronger. She may never control it as well as he can - but she could not be stopped by him. A small piece of kryptonite can fell him, but where the gravity of this planet still knocks her over unexpectedly, she can hold pieces in her teeth. Holds them tight to feel them cutting into her palms, to feel anything at all.

Kara looks at the stars - knows when some will burn out from Earth’s sky, because she has seen them disappear from hers. She wants to find Krypton, but fears watching its burning, fading light from a foreign sky. 

What is it that humans say?   
You can't go home again.   
You can't recover the past. 

Maybe Krypton is better off where it is; Kara is sure that if she has to watch her home’s destruction twice, she might just snap. She might just tear down the world her cousin is so bent on protecting.

He might not not realize it, but Kara does. She has seen planets die before, studied their histories and their downfalls. Earth will not last another millenium. It is an impossible task, saving humans from themselves.

Sometimes, Kara thinks she’ll just speed them along. Collapse a few bridges. Burn out some major power systems. Rage against the yellow sun, and gravity and tear down anything and everything she can grab. Make earthquakes and tsunamis. Set the world on fire. Scream, rant, rage and destroy until there is nothing left for her cousin to save.   
Until the survivors know how she feels. Until her cousin has no choice but to accept their heritage.   
Until the earth is no more.

The feelings always pass eventually, but one day, she worries her conscious will not be enough to stop her.

Lex gives her, or sends her really, kryptonite rocks and pebbles. It is not a threat, though she knows Kal-El and the Danvers would see it as such. It is solidarity perhaps. He keeps Lana Lang’s locket to remember, and to feel safe, though Clark would never really hurt him. It is security, as unnecessary as it may be. She fears herself more than he could ever fear them.

She keeps the kryptonite in a lead-lined box under the bed. When she wants to destroy everything, she holds them in her palms, until she feels almost approximately human in strength. Until she cannot shoot lasers from her eyes. Until her fingers ache and bleed, and the feeling of ending everything passes.

 

3 - “Men kill for this, or for as much.”

Lex wakes up screaming from nightmares - what ifs, what might have been, what might still come.

Kara wakes up screaming from memories - Krypton burning, learning she is twenty five years too late, her cousin’s awful accent, his retreating back in the sky from Midvale. 

Lex screams hoping against hope Clark will hear him.

Kara swallows her screams, hoping he won’t. 

Here are truths Kara has learned on earth: people die always, but people only care sometimes. In another country, people die - a pity, not a tragedy. People don’t feel what they do not experience. That is Krypton - someone else’s tragedy. For the earth, even for Kal-El, Krypton’s loss is not like a freshless amputated limb, it is not a bleeding scabbing laceration. It is a scar so old as to be forgotten, a fact known, but no longer felt, save for sympathy and empathy if considered too long. 

More than that, people kill. They set fires, bomb building, invade cities and kill innocents. For money, for power, for fame. They poison rivers and send smoke fumes into the air and fell trees for their own game, and no one bats an eye.

Men kill for this; this second chance she has.

She will not be like them.


End file.
